Who Actually Thinks Citizens United Is Good for Elections? Turns Out, Hardly Anyone
(COMMON DREAMS) Sarah Lazare — Only one in ten people in the United States thinks that the Supreme Court’s 2010Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates to unprecedented outside spending to influence elections, has actually improved the process of nominating presidential candidates, according to a Monmouth University pollreleased Wednesday.
Meanwhile, nearly half of the U.S. public says that the “looser finance rules and an influx of campaign cash” has made the candidate nominating process worse than before Citizens United, the study finds.
Researchers surveyed 1,001 adults across the United States between July 9 and 12, and they say their findings have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent.
“The public is starting to worry that the Wild West nature of campaign finance is damaging the way we choose presidential candidates,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, which is based in New Jersey.
Wednesday’s poll is not the first of its kind. A survey released in June by The New York Times and CBS found that the U.S. public opposes the unlimited flow of dollars into politics, does not think money equals speech, and wants to restrict the power of the one percent to buy ballot outcomes.